One of the most effective sermons I have ever preached was shared ten years ago when I was just beginning to preach. I didn’t expect it to be good because I was tired when I wrote it and tired when I preached it. In fact, I was afraid I was failing the people that day because I thought the sermon wasn’t much good at all.

In the sermon I shared with the folks why I was so tired, all the things that had happened to me that week. A child had died in City Hospital. The parents had no friends, no family, no one. Their doctor asked me to do the funeral. We sat together quietly in the funeral home, looking at the little lifeless body laid in a cardboard coffin. A member of the congregation I was serving as a summer vicar had suffered a near-fatal heart attack and that had taken a lot of attentio…